today, I run into people who treat me poorly because I’m
haole.Hawai’ians talk
The aboriginal Polynesian language of Hawai’i (‘Olelo Hawai’i) was the
only language spoken in the islands until they were colonized, when
Hawai’i was annexed by the U.S. and her government forcibly disbanded.
As is usually the case in when a country is colonized, ‘Olelo Hawai’i was
systematically suppressed and finally outlawed. It wasn’t until 1978 the
native language regained its status as one of the official languages of the
state.^4
Even before colonization, a trade language – a pidgin – took root and
then evolved into Hawai’i Creole. There is still a good deal of controversy
about the nature, origin and development of pidgins into creoles, but a few
things have been established. First and foremost: A pidgin is nobody’s
native language.
Pidgins arise in a restricted social context, where people speaking two
or more different languages must communicate with each other for short
periods of time, in specific ways. The classic example is that of a seaport,
where ships from near and far come and go, and unloading or loading
cargo. For these very specific and limited situations, communication is
accomplished by means of a pidgin, a language cobbled together from
three or four languages in contact. The structure of a pidgin is reduced and
simplified. For example, pidgins don’t have subordinate clauses or copulas
and they use a reduced pronoun system. These kinds of simplifications are
true of pidgins no matter where they arise.
If the conditions are right, and children are born into a setting where a
pidgin is actively used, the pidgin may evolve into a creole. The children
take in the raw data of the pidgin and in the process of language
acquisition, they expand it into a fully functioning language (Grimes 1994;
Grimes 1994; Marlow and Giles 2008; Tamura 2008).